Ecommerce Best Practices: Tips to Improve Your Sales

If you’re selling something online, your ecommerce website is where all the action needs to happen. Whether you’re in the initial design and launch stage, or looking to increase your sales, there are some crucial elements of the overall design – ecommerce best practices that all the giants follow – that will have a massive impact on your bottom line.

Today’s consumers have pretty high expectations of the business they choose to give their hard-earned money too. In almost every industry out there, competition is stiff. If you want users to stay on your site, buy from you, and come back to your site over and over, you’ve got to be giving them a fantastic user experience.

Creating a positive user experience isn’t easy, and there are many variables to consider. From the images you use to your ease of facilitating a transaction, there’s lots to think about if you want those customers to keep coming back.

Here are some ecommerce best practices to help you increase sales on your website:

You Need Eye-Catching & Appealing Photos

Regardless of what you’re selling, your images matter. So much of what we absorb online today is visual, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. Consumers are attracted to things that grab their attention, so make sure your images are going to get noticed. Your product images are hugely important to whether or not someone will make a purchase.

Some surveys have shown that more than 65% of online shoppers say that great product images are more effective than product reviews or information when making a purchase decision. That’s pretty powerful stuff!

Answer Questions & Combat Objections Through Product Demos

Whether you’re selling an app or a purse, having a product demo that both answers questions and combats objections is an extremely powerful sales tool. Demos show consumers what your product will do. If you want them to buy it, this is obviously an effective way to show them that your product is the solution to their problem.

But why stop there? Take it a step further and get creative with ways you can use the demo feature to combat the potential objections you’re used to dealing with. Similar to handling objections on a landing page before they’re even asked, you can do this through your product demo too. Think about what questions and objections your sales team hears the most, and find a way to build those into your product demo.

Make Navigation Really, Really Easy

While you always want your homepage to look crisp and clean, don’t do it at the expense of your user experience. When someone winds up on a certain page, make sure they can easily trace back their steps to get where the came from. Setting up these “breadcrumbs” is a key ecommerce best practice that will ensure people can go back to anything that piqued their interest, and not feel frustrated if they wind up on the wrong page because of one misplaced click.

Use your navigation bar and possible filters to their full extent. Using an extended navigation bar still looks clean, but allows for a slew of options not possible with smaller formats. This makes it significantly easier for people to find exactly what they’re looking for, and more likely they’ll stick around.

Use filters to help people pick through things like features, sizes, price ranges, designers, manufacturers, and more. Make it as easily as possible for people to quickly find what they’re looking for. Consumers expect finding what they want to be easy, so you need to remove as many barriers as possible through your ecommerce platform.

Use Personalization Everywhere You Can

Amazon and Netflix both do a really great job of employing ecommerce best practices. If you’re a Netflix subscriber, many of the shows you watch have likely come from the emails and suggestions Netflix has made, based on your past viewing history. Take advantage of any opportunity to make meaningful, personalized suggestions to your shoppers. It will engage them, and continue to drive value by showing them you’ve got plenty more to offer.

Those are just a few of the many things you can do to make your user experience on your ecommerce site that much better. If you want people to shop and keep coming back, you’ve got to keep working on optimizing their overall experience.

Let Goji Labs help you create the ecommerce website your business needs to thrive.

Post originally appeared on gojilabs.com.